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Saz and Dave's travels
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAVE! As you can see, today was Dave's birthday and to celebrate we decided to go on a trip into the Blue Mountains near Sydney. We arranged to be picked up by the tour at 7:40am just up the road from where we were staying and accordingly had set the alarm to go off at 7am. However unfortunately the clock was still set to Singapore time meaning the alarm never actuall went off and at 7:30am when I was luckily woken up by some noise outside we had to spring out of bed grab some clothes and hurridly check out of our room and leg it up the road.
The group for the Blue Mountains tour consisted of about 18 people, most of which didn't seem too annoying! The first stop of the day was the site for the Sydney olympic games which was quite interesting to see. Next we stopped off at a small zoo where you could get up close to Koalas, Kangaroos and Wallabys. Dave felt brave and held a strange looking bird with a toadlike head and patted a kangaroo, but I kept my distance, not wanting a kick in the head! After a bacon and egg burger for breakfast, Dave looked like he was properly getting into the birthday spirit.
After breakfast, we got to see some snakes and spiders, thankfully behind glass and were shocked to discover that the red-back spider, one of the deadly spiders is tiny - about the size of a five pence piece.
At about 11am it was time to leave the zoo much to our disappointment, and get back on the bus into the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains apparently get their name from the European settlers who came to Australia and seeing the mountains from a distance thought that they were blue. What they didn't realise is that everything here looks blue from a distance, due to the vapour rising from the eucalyptus trees as the oil evaporates.
After about an hour we stopped off and went for a bit of a bush walk down to a waterfall and a couple of stunning view points. The scenery here is fantastic helped out by the fact that it was a gorgeous sunny day! The walk didn't last too long and we would have liked a bit more activity but there is a lot to fit in today so we kept moving.
We had lunch at a great spot overlooking the valley and the 3 sisters which aare 3 big rock formations. Apparently, according to the aboriginies, the 3 sisters are actually 3 beautiful oung women who their father turned into stone to protect them from being eaten by a dragon like creature. The father turned himself into a bird to escape the creature, but lost his magic stick in doing so. To this day you can still here the bird crying out for his magic stick so he can turn his daughters back into the living beauties they once were.
Dave was very impressed with his lunch, perhaps more so than the story as it was a delicious sandwich with cheese, rocket, avocado and sauce! After lunch we headed off to the final stop of the day - Scenic World. Here we got too go on a great walk down to the valley floor and then catch the world's steepest railway back up. This was pretty scary as the steepest incline was 52 degrees and we were facing backwards up the mountain, literally just staring vertically down. If we had more time we would have liked to go on the other rides here such as the glass bottom cable car over the valley but we had to leave at about 4pm.
We got back to Sydney at about 5:30pm where we got a quick shower then headed out for one of Dave's favourite meals - Pizza! After this we had to get the train to central where we were catching the overnight bus to Byron Bay. We were lucky not to miss the bus as when we got off the train we got a bit lost and had to walk very fast to the bus to get there on time! Once on the bus we managed to get two seats each and make ourselves comfortable for the 11 hour journey in front of us.
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